Questioning

Late November: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A few years ago, I teamed up
with two colleagues in the English and Ethics departments to team-teach this
Humanities course built around the theme of freedom. The course is divided into
six units, each juxtaposing freedom with another concept that exists in some
tension with it. So, for example, we open the school year with freedom and
tolerance, in which we read The Scarlet
Letter and study literal and metaphorical witch-hunts (like McCarthyism,
allegorized in The Crucible, or the
AIDS crisis, as depicted in Angels in
America). Huck Finn is embedded
in the transition between freedom/independence (the American Revolution,
Transcendentalism, adolescent development) and freedom/slavery (Toni Morrison’s
A Mercy, Phillis Wheatley, the Civil
War). In every unit we juxtapose the literary and historical material with
philosophy (Aristotle’s notion of slavery) and modern-day analogies (is modern-day
sweatshop labor simply slavery by another name?).

It was a real challenge to get this
course off the ground, and it took a couple of years of tinkering to get it
right. Now it hums along, and there are times when I find it a little boring.
When you do the same book year after year, you tend to get lazy; I haven’t
actually re-read Huck in years. I’ve
got a well-annotated copy I review as we get underway for about a two-week
stretch of classes, and I’m probably one of the few people who uses SparkNotes
for its supposed purpose: as a means to review the book (as opposed to a
substitute for reading it). Actually, my main source of preparation for class,
adopted at the urging of my tech-savvy colleage, is the online forum in which
students are required to post passages they find interesting and to explain
why. I’ll pluck out something I think has possibilities for close reading, or
note if there’s a passage that seems to get multiple takers.

I’ve also got a few set pieces that I
know from experience will generate a good conversation. One, of course, is the
famous passage in Chapter 31, in which an anguished Huck, is torn between
returning lost (human) property to its legal owner versus helping that property
find his freedom. He finally decides on the latter: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says, ripping up the
note he’d written disclosing the location of the escaped slave Jim.

So it is that when I walk in to the classroom for what will be my
fourth discussion of Huck Finn on a
chilly but brilliant autumnal day I’m a little rusty but ready to improvise.
I’ve got to pocket Chapter 31, because it will be awhile before we get there.
So instead I’ll ask the students to summarize the novel through the first eight
chapters, which is a relatively easy point of entry as well as a device to jog
my memory. So gang,” I ask, raising a steaming paper cup of coffee to my lips,
“who is Huckleberry Finn?”

I sip in silence. Damn. This is a
misfire: I intended a kid to say something like, “He’s a boy from Missouri
who’s running away from his father and traveling with an escaped slave.” But it
seems my query has been interpreted more interpretively and thus difficult to answer, as if I’m
expecting something like, “He’s an empathic pragmatist in a morally corrupt
social milieu.” I put my cup down on my desk, wait a beat, and say, “He’s a
very blank person who blanks. Go ahead in fill in those
blanks.”

Still nothing. And then Alba
Montanez—decent student though her last essay was all over the place—blurts
out, “He’s obsessed with death.”

I think: Blech.

I say: “Interesting, Alba. Can you
elaborate a bit?”

Kim Anders—volleyball team, got a 92 on
the last test, litigated another three points out of me—says, “Yes! I was thinking
the same thing!”

What wavelength
are these kids on? “OK,” I say. “But why?”

Kim continues her interruption of Alba.
“Well, his mother is dead, right? That’s like the first thing we’re told.”

“Yes, we’re told that. But where do you
get the idea of this death fixation?” I know I sound little impatient, but I
think it’s a fair question, and I think in any case that I can get away with
posing it, even with some irritation, to Kim.

But it’s Alba jumps back in. “It says
right here on page six that the widow read to him about Moses. ‘She let it out
that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care about
him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.’”

“Hmmm. So the fact that he’s talking
about a dead person—says he doesn’t care
about dead people—is evidence of an obsession.” I make this a statement, not a
question. I’m hoping I can gently jog her out of what I regard as a foolish
assertion.

Instead, Alba says “Exactly.” I’m about
to argue the point but stop myself. “What do the rest of you think? Do you
agree with Alba and Kim that Huck has a death fixation?

I scan the faces in the room. Steven
Gridley is looking out the window. Tommy Giddens is whispering to Zak Pacek. Tara
Millberg is staring at her laptop. Evelyn WuWong is looking at me expectantly.
She’s paying attention but clearly has no intention of jumping into the fray.

Tara, who has permission to
take notes with the laptop but in all likelihood has been shopping for shoes,
looks up. “He’s just so, what’s the word . . . you know when you’re just only
reacting to what other people do—”

There’s something incongruous
about Tara Millberg—lustrous hair, ruddy cheeks, fingernail polish that picks
up the accents on her wool sweater—talking about death. It seems so remote that
she can barely talk about it coherently. And yet she’s not entirely wrong. And,
sure as she sitting there, death, like that character in the Emily Dickinson
poem, will be coming by to claim her. For the first time, I’m curious about
what will happen in the meantime.

“I’m a little confused,” I say,
returning my gaze to Alba. “How can you be obsessed with death at the same
moment you’re saying you don’t put no stock in dead people? Isn’t that a
contradiction?”

Alba narrows her eyes, taking
the question in. Is she going to be able to parry it? If she doesn’t, maybe I
can steer this conversation back on course—or, maybe more accurately, out of
the gate. I’m thinking the opening of Chapter 4, in which Huck talks about his
schooling (he could “spell, and read, and write just a little, and say the multiplication
table up to six times seven is thirty-five”). Can’t go wrong talking about
education with high school kids.

But now it’s Sam Stevens—Dad
writes for the Times, apparently he’s
a good guitar player—who enters the fray. “What’s with the staging his death
thing?”

“Staging his death thing?”

“Yeah. When his dad starts
beating him. He makes it look like he’s been killed.”

“Right. That’s how he makes his
escape. It’s a means to an end. Doesn’t mean he’s obsessed with death, does
it?”

“Kinda weird, if you ask me.”

I guess I did ask. Maybe these kids are on to something.

“I think Huck is depressed.”
This from Dana Weiss. Figures. It’s not the first time I’ve heard therapy-speak
from her. I remember her once referring to Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter as having low
self-esteem. Tell me Mom isn’t a
psychotherapist.

“Depressed, huh?”

“Yeah. I think so. I actually
read ahead a little bit to the whole Grangerfords and Sherpherdsons clan war
thing. That whole part about Emmeline Grangerford. After she dies Huck seems
really upset. It’s interesting after the whole Moses thing Alba just read. It’s
like this is the first time he allows himself to really grieve. And then he
says something like ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

I’m a little stunned by this insight.
My memory of the book is sketchy, but I know what Dana is talking about.

“Thanks a lot for giving the
plot away!” Kim exclaims.

I’m about to try to explain to
Kim that it’s not that big a deal when suddenly the fire alarm goes off. Damn.
I remember the assistant principal telling me yesterday we’re behind on the
quota that the state mandates. “Oh!” Dana says, genuinely upset. Steven Gridley
looks like he’s just received a get-out-of-jail card. As per our protocol, we
file out of the room and out of the building silently.

Shivering on the sidewalk,
waiting for the all-clear, an essay question begins to take shape: Some observers of The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (wink, wink) say that
the Huck Finn we meet at the start of the story is suffering from depression,
and in particular an obsession with death. Do you agree? If not, why not? If
so, explain why—and where, if anywhere, you think that begins to change. In
what ways would you say his state of mind is shaped by his historical
circumstances? Be sure to use evidence from the novel to support your thesis.
Gonna have to think about the depression thing—how to define it. Then again,
let’s see if any of them do it. I’m always talking about defining your terms.
Maybe a few of them will.

“Two down, six to go,” my
colleague Eddie Vinateri says of the fire drills as we get the signal to head
back into the building. After a pause, he gestures toward my clutch of
returning students, a few of whom have, unaccountably, taken the book out with
them. “How’s Humanities going?”

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen